A MYSTERY Australian fighter pilot shot down 70 years ago next Tuesday during the Battle of Normandy has ­finally been honoured in France, and by chance in South Australia. The question of the pilot’s identity remained unsolved until last year.

On Tuesday the villagers of Guerquesalles in Normandy will unveil a plaque to the pilot as part of its Battle of Normandy anniversary celebrations.

Meanwhile, in Adelaide and Guerquesalles two families are marvelling at a series of accidental cross connections.

On August 19, 1944, the ­Typhoon fighter plane of the Royal Air Force crashed in a wood in Normandy.

Villagers found an empty cockpit and no sign that the pilot had been aboard when the plane crashed.

Local farmer Emile Sene salvaged a section of fuselage and used it as part of his chook shed. A collector of wartime relics, Luc Fourmy, a sawmiller of nearby Aspres, heard of the henhouse fuselage and retrieved it and preserved it as part of his collection.

It would be 68 years before a historian, Stephane Robine, went to Guerquesalles in 2012 and asked mayor Didier Goret for the details of the planes shot down in the parish.

Didier introduced deputy mayor Bernard Bruand, who now owned the wood where the Typhoon had crashed, and they traced the fuselage to Luc Fourmy.

There, Robine found that the regimental numbers on the fuselage could still be made out. He positively identified the Typhoon as belonging to Australian pilot Ronald Gilbert, born in Newcastle and a volunteer serviceman aged 22.

His plane was last seen flying low and straight following a ground rocket attack by four Typhoons from 181 Squadron on German lines.

No trace of Gilbert has ever been found. His name is inscribed on the Air Forces Memorial at Runymede, in Surrey in the UK. He may have shared the fate of some other downed pilots in this late stage of the war, captured by the Germans and killed in subsequent Allied bombing raids.

The month before Gilbert’s ill-fated sortie, he had posed for a photograph with two friends at the front of his Typhoon. One of them was Tom McGovern.

When Robine returned to Guerquesalles and showed the photograph to Mayor Didier Goret, the name McGovern was familiar.

Thirty years before, in 1982, Goret and his wife Marie-Odile and children had visited Australia and stayed with Tom McGovern’s daughter Bronya, a former staff artist at The ­Advertiser.

The two families had stayed in contact and in 2010 Bronya’s daughter Geena had been with the Gorets on exchange at a school in nearby Caen.

“We sent the photo from the military archives. Bronya McGovern confirmed to us that the war companion of ­Ronald Gilbert was none other than her father,” said Goret, quoted in a report of the incident in a local newspaper, Ouest France.

Bronya McGovern said she had met the Gorets purely by chance through a mutual French friend. “(Didier) sent me the link to the photo from the Australian War Memorial and asked: ‘Tell us if this Thomas McGovern is your ­father.

“If yes, maybe he will be happy to know that his friend is not totally forgotten’.”

Her father, Tom McGovern DFC, a judge of the Family Court, died last year, having learned more of the fate of his friend “Gilbo” before he died.

He had not been on that last mission with “Gilbo” over France.

McGovern was himself shot down during an air strike over Holland in 1945 and captured by the Germans.

Another person given ­solace when she heard the news from France was Ronald Gilbert’s sister, now well into her 90s.

She had tried in vain for years to find news of her brother and had eventually been forced to assume that he must have crashed in the sea.

In October last year Geena again stayed with the Gorets.

In a ceremony attended by villagers from Guerquesalles, she planted a eucalypt in the wood next to the spot where the Typhoon crashed.

On Tuesday, August 19, Mayor Goret will today lead a ceremony at the local church to unveil a plaque in honour of Ronald Desmond Gilbert, as Guerquesalles’ commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy.

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